“You have heard me speak well of Argile,” he said, quietly. “I never said a word in his praise that was not deserved; indeed I have been limited in my valuation of his virtues and ornaments, lest they should think it the paid chaplain who spoke and not the honest acquaintance. I know pious men, Highland and Lowland, but my lord of Argile has more than any of them the qualities of perfection. At home yonder, he rises every morning at five and is in private till eight. He prays in his household night and morning, and never went abroad, though but for one night, but he took his write-book, standish, and English New Bible, and Newman’s Concordance with him. Last summer, playing one day with the bullats with some gentlemen, one of them, when the Marquis stopped to lift his bullat, fell pale, and said to them about him, ‘Bless me, it is that I see my lord with his head off and all his shoulder full of blood.’ A wicked man would have counted that the most gloomy portent and a fit occasion for dread, for the person who spoke was the Laird of Drimmindorren’s seventh son, with a reputation for the second sight. But Argile laughed at the thing, no way alarmed, and then with a grave demeanour he said, said he, ‘The wine’s in your head, sir; and even if it was an omen, what then? The axe in troublous times is no disgrace, and a chief of Clan Diarmaid would be a poor chief indeed if he failed to surrender his head with some show of dignity.”’ “But to leave his people twice in one war with no apparent valid excuse must look odd to his unfriends,” I said, and I toasted my hose at the fire. “I wish I could make up my mind whether an excuse is valid or not,” said the cleric; “and I’m willing to find more excuses for MacCailein than I’ll warrant he can find for himself this morning, wherever he may happen to be. It is the humour of God Almighty sometimes to put two men in the one skin. So far as I may humbly judge, Argile is the poor victim of such an economy. You have seen the sort of man I mean: to-day generous to his last plack, to-morrow the widow’s oppressor; Sunday a soul humble at the throne of grace, and writhing with remorse for some child’s sin, Monday riding vain-gloriously in the glaur on the road to hell, bragging of filthy amours, and inwardly gloating upon a crime anticipated. Oh, but were the human soul made on less devious plan, how my trade of Gospel messenger were easy! And valour, too, is it not in most men a fever of the moment; at another hour the call for courage might find them quailing and flying like the coney of the rocks.” “Then Argile, you think, was on those occasions the sport of his weaker self?” I pushed. I found so many obstacles in the way of satisfaction to my natural curiosity that I counted no persistence too rude now.